Christof is professor in modern history at the University of Bern, Switzerland. Before coming to Bern he held temporary professorships at Freiburg i. Br., Konstanz, Basel and the FU Berlin and was a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Cambridge (2013-2015). His field of expertise include European history, global history and social and economic history. He is the author of, among others, Commodity Trading, Globalization and the Colonial World (2018) and co-editor of The Global Bourgeoisie (2019) and, recently, a special issue of the Historical Journal on Global Social History.

Lost traces. Global dis:connections in the genealogy of European social history

At global dis:connect, Christof will work on a monograph on the relationship between German Anthropology and Folklore studies between the 1850s and the 1930s. In the late 19th century, many anthropologists expounded the similarities of “primitive” societies in colonial and European rural peripheries as a matter of fact. Such a joint perspective, however, became ever more challenged after the turn of the century when domestic traditions became the foundation of regional and national identities. This disconnection was sustained by distinct notions of temporality: colonial cultures remained to be considered “peoples without history” by contemporary scholars, whereas European folk culture was integrated into a regional historical framework. The project thus analyses what was described as “inventions of tradition” by European social historians on the one hand and the “othering” of non-European civilisations as studied by global historians and postcolonial scholars on the other within one field of analysis and theoretical framework.